Quieting The Noise: And How You’ll Know When Its Time To Leave Your First Job

During the Marquette Review banquet in March, Steven Biskupic, former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin and the featured speaker, explained why we law students should leave our first job. He gave many reasons for why one should leave, such as general dissatisfaction or being asked to sacrifice our own moral standards. But the harder part, and the question addressed here, is how does one know when its time to leave?

This process begins with sensitivity. Not the type of sensitivity we associate with hurt feelings or emotionalism, but the innate ability to feel what is around and inside us. For instance, anyone who spends any time around a law school during finals can feel a certain something in the air. There is an intensity, a buzz, a tension, and it is palpable. It is so palpable, in fact, that everyone feels it. One can almost taste it. It is not uncommon to hear students say things like, “I have to get out of the building, it is too intense in there.” But if you look around, it is not the sort of intensity that is produced by some form of frantic, kinetic movement, like the kind you might find at a tax preparer’s office in early April. Rather, it is the sort of potential energy you find stored in the minds and bodies of students who, with head in hands, exude anxiety, fear, and stress. Sometimes it is visible in the faces of those around us, but even if it can’t be seen, it can be felt.

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The Importance of Legal Apprenticeship: Why There is no Substitute for the Master-Student Relationship

“Never trust a teacher who does not have a teacher.”

-Unknown

On the first day of my Summer Clerkship in 2016 at the firm of Anspach Meeks Ellenberger LLP in Toledo, Ohio, Mark Meeks, a partner at the firm, sat me down in his office to give me the rundown of what I could expect during my twelve weeks there.  At that meeting, he stressed the importance of the work I would be doing, as well as the fact that most of it would be spent on what was going to turn out to be one of the most important cases the firm would try in years.  He also said something I will never forget: “What you learn in law school is a mile wide and an inch deep.”  He told me I would likely learn more during that summer than I did in my entire first year of law school.  I was skeptical, but by the end of the summer, I would come to understand what he meant.

My father, Robert Anspach, is founder and managing partner of the firm.  In his office there is a picture hanging on the wall of a man no older than my father is today.  If I didn’t know any better, I would have guessed it was his father.  It is, however, not a blood relative: it is a picture of Charlie W. Peckinpaugh, Jr., the man who mentored my father during his early, formative years as a practicing attorney, into the effective lawyer he is today. (Pictured above.)

The Master-Apprentice relationship has been around for millennia. (Consider, for example, one of the most well-known teacher-student relationships of Socrates and Plato).  In the study of Yoga (capital “Y,” for union of mind, body, and spirit), those who want to become teachers (or better yet, who are called to be teachers), learn to master their art by studying under this sort of tutelage.

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